More IT Pros Could Turn To E-Crime In Poor Economy

snydeq writes to mention that a recent survey by KPMG shows that many people feel that out-of-work IT workers will be much more tempted to turn to criminal activities due to the down economy. This, coupled with an E-crime survey that shows fraud committed by managers, employees, and customers tripled between 2007 and 2008 paints an interesting picture. "In other survey results, 45 percent of respondents who handle critical national infrastructure said they are seeing an increase in the number of attacks on their systems. Fifty-one percent of respondents from the same category said the technical sophistication of those attacks is getting better. Sixty-eight percent said that of all kinds of malicious code they felt Trojan horse programs — ones that are designed to look harmless but can steal data along with other functions — had the most impact on their businesses. Rootkits are the next highest concern, followed by spyware, worms, viruses, mobile malicious code and, finally, adware."

Re:Erm? How is this bad?

[ConsumerOfMany]

If you survey 100 people who were mugged once last year about how many times they have been mugged this year and 50% said the same (lets say 1) and 50% said increased to 2, then you would have a 50% increase (from 100 to 150 total) this year. So yeas, these stats can be perfectly valid.

Re:FAQ

[morgan_greywolf]

I googled for the ecrime howto but couldn't find it. Link please.

Try reading this zine [phrack.com] and this zine, too [2600.com]. This is also recommended [darkreading.com]. Try here, too [darknet.org.uk]. Start searching forums, IRC, etc. Subscribe to all the major vulnerability sites, too. Learn to code, if you don't already know how. Get skills in C, assembler, Java, SQL, Visual Basic, Python, PHP, Perl, Unix, Linux, Windows, DNS, TCP/IP, routing protocols, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc. Understand how networks and systems work, architecturally speaking, from a high-level all the way down to the physical hardware.

The learning curve is pretty steep for anyone who wishes to ascend beyond the level of 'l337 skr1p7 k1dd13'.

Be aware, however, that the penalties for getting caught are very high. Think Kevin Mitnick.